Wow, IE6 is even more annoying than I remember.
Oh, you know: Internet Explorer 6 is that one browser Microsoft released with Windows XP, easily the most popular browser in the world and also probably the least secure, target of phishing scams and spammy toolbar add-ons, providing only the bare minimal features of the modern browser.
Did you know that on the web development side, it’s somehow possible that working with IE is even worse? Its bugs are well documented; IE ignores all the effort put into standardizing browser rendering behavior and happily follows its own rules, thanklessly adding countless hours of development time to any website hoping to display competently on the (sadly) most popular browser in the world.
To add insult to injury, those of us who have upgraded to Windows Vista and wish to mold our creations on Microsoft’s (supposedly) latest-and-greatest platform have absolutely no way to run IE6 on the operating system. The current workaround is to download a full image of Windows XP and load an entire virtual machine so we can run…IE6.
All this is just a long way of saying that my site does not display properly in the dreaded browser (the right toolbar get shoved to the next element, i.e., the bottom of the page) and after spending an hour I am no closer to figuring out how to deal with the annoying bug.
The moral of the story: don’t use Internet Explorer.
Ok, one more fluff web post. (they’re easy to write)
I was looking through my blog stats today, and I found an interesting incoming link from – of all places – MSN Encarta, the somewhat defunct encyclopedia Microsoft took over. The link came specifically from the “incoherence” article, which certainly made me a bit curious:
Sorry for the small picture, but what you see here is the Encarta page with some Windows Live search results thrown in. It’s been a while since I’ve checked, but I’ve moved up the search engine rankings! Turns out, site longevity and outlinking does count for something.
(For the record, searching for “incoherence” yields my site as the first result on Windows Live, fourth on Google, and sixth on Yahoo! behind a freaking incoherence.com domain squatter. No wonder they’re laying people off.)
I found something pretty cool today. Instapaper is a web bookmarking site: save a link onto the site and come back to it later. As an added bonus, it tracks whether a link has been read, and no e-mail is required for registration.
What makes the site worthwhile is its bookmarklet – it’s a bookmark meant to be placed on your toolbar in Firefox (and maybe Internet Explorer too? It’s just Javascript), which acts like a button and performs a fancy web trick to add your current site to Instapaper’s list. Overly long articles discovered at work can now be saved for home reading without synchronizing bookmarks or – ugh – emailing yourself.
The one thing I thought they were missing was the ability to share lists of bookmarks, but then again, it’d intrude on sites like del.icio.us and destroy its wonderful simplicity.
I came across this pretty cool site today: kwout is an utility for bloggers and web developers to quickly create good-looking screen captures off of URL’s. It’s not anything a screen capture, Photoshop, and some careful image map placement can’t do (it maps all the links on the page into actual clickable links!), but obviously it saves a lot of time and effort.
Taking a shot of my v5 page right before this post (the copy+pasted code is hideous, there are a ton of links on my homepage…):
It’s probably been a while since you’ve Googled yourself. Maybe it’s time to revisit those search databases and check your fresh digital footprint of the past few months.
Go on; I’ll wait.
Chances are, beyond random forum posts and site login pages Google/Yahoo/MSN Live figured out how to access, most of us who are not famous and do not share a name common with those of higher fame (the lack of originality in Chinese surnames doesn’t help) escape from the eternal archiving crutches of the great interwebs.
Sure, the internet is great for transferring information, but it’s pretty lousy at keeping and organizing that information, despite the efforts of a truckload of very smart people. New data replaces old, and keeping accurate historical information is a difficult task when so much information exists; beyond the likes of Facebook profiles, most of our contributions are decentralized and loosely tied together by a name or most likely, an online alias.
An hour of my Sundays are reserved for comings and goings of money; the weekly ritual includes a scouring of online banking, credit card, and investment websites, plus a review of my expenditures for the week. Besides the occasional curse at the bear market draining my retirement funds, the process is tedious and about as interesting as this sentence.
Imagine the wildest adventure possible with a copy of Microsoft Money, a directory of Firefox bookmarks, and a handful of receipts, bank statements, and bills. Tone down the explosions a bit and you’ve got my manual transaction machine of an evening.
I’ve been slowly moving my finances online, though, with pleasant results once I got past the fear of entrusting an unknown entity with my numbers. Research and due diligence helps alleviate some of those fears; my experience with these sites has been surreal and I’d recommend anyone looking to clarify or define their financial landscape to check out some of the free tools available online.
